[HN Gopher] Google in 1999: Search engines escape the portal matrix
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Google in 1999: Search engines escape the portal matrix
Author : speckx
Score : 18 points
Date : 2025-07-25 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cybercultural.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybercultural.com)
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its
| categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it
| was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are
| SEO spam.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Do you think it might be possible that today's web is many
| orders of magnitude larger than the Yahoo directory?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Yes, and it is mostly trash.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Size of the web does not matter, it is more about not
| obsessing about cataloging the entire web and focusing on the
| content offered through the portal. I think the biggest issue
| to overcome with doing such a thing in 2025 is the death of
| links pages and webrings, they allowed the portal to give you
| access to web beyond the sites listed on the portal. But the
| blog killed the homepage and with it went their links page
| and the webrings they were members of.
|
| The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal
| curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated
| web as well through those links pages and webrings.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| I still credit dmoz (one of the main data sources back in the
| days of pre-google portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ)
| for giving me good habits for data classification
|
| And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use
| social media because I mostly only follow people who
| curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of
| human curators having ownership of their own categories
| waldopat wrote:
| "If a GoTo user looks for 'New York Yankees,' the first 10
| choices are paid advertisers ('Buy Yankees gear at Fogdog
| Sports'). On the 11th try you finally get Yankees.com, the
| official site of the world champs. (On Google, this comes up
| first.)"
|
| So...we're back to 1999 when the first 10 choices are paid ads?
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| It would seem there's an opening for a new search engine
| nostrademons wrote:
| The root of Google's malaise is that the web is dying. If I
| go to yankees.com, I get a 403. The Yankee's official site is
| now mlb.com/yankees, i.e. they've signed on to the generic
| Major League Baseball portal and just have a stock database
| record there. Likely they did this because the cost to run an
| independent website has ballooned, with all the abuse
| prevention and detection, anti-spam, hacking & cybersecurity,
| people who are trying to do something illegal and use your
| website as a conduit for it, legal regulations, DDoS
| prevention, etc. stuff you have to do.
|
| FWIW, this site is down about 2-3 screenfuls in Google, well
| below the fold, so Google isn't blameless here. The results
| above it are a sports onebox, news universal, and Twitter
| highlights, though, all about the Yankees/Phillies game
| tonight, so arguably they are showing what users actually are
| most likely to want to see.
| echelon wrote:
| This ought to be illegal.
|
| Google is charging money on other people's brands.
|
| This wouldn't be a problem if there were ten popular search
| engines, or if portals were still popular and there were ten
| popular portals.
|
| But what Google has done is gross monopolistic misconduct.
|
| They've "removed the URL bar" and turned it into a search bar.
| They've put their browser on all devices and made it the
| default. They've made Google search the default. They've
| destroyed the ad blocker.
|
| Now, when I search for a brand, I see an ad that looks like an
| official result in first place.
|
| iPhone -> paid ad
|
| Nike -> paid ad
|
| Midjourney -> paid ad
|
| These are companies' hard earned brands, and yet Google is
| collecting rent on them.
|
| Google is taxing the entire internet. This ought to be illegal.
|
| Google deserves to be broken up.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google is not the internet and this behavior is not exclusive
| to Google. For example TikTok does the same thing. They have
| search ads when you search for brands on their platform. The
| TikTok app never had a url bar, TikTok provides search for
| TikTok, and it never had an ad blocker. Same thing for
| Amazon, same thing for X, etc.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Google is not the internet_
|
| No, but they _are_ , with ever increasing accuracy, _the
| web_.
| echelon wrote:
| You don't search TikTok to buy something from BestBuy.com
|
| You use Chrome and Google, and both are interfering with
| that process. They're sticking themselves in the middle of
| that transaction and neither you nor Best Buy want them
| there.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are no ads on the results I see for "New York Yankees" on
| Google right now.
|
| Also there is a HUGE difference in ad quality between the old
| pay for placement guys and Google. On Google, your ad has to be
| relevant and will be downranked into oblivion if nobody clicks
| on it. On Overture and the rest of them, that was not the case,
| they just auctioned off the results without regard to whether
| any of it was relevant. I know some of you refuse to believe
| this, but Google search ads are themselves a corpus of
| documents that are responsive to the user's search term.
| clippy99 wrote:
| Who uses google to search anymore? LLMs FTW.
| leptons wrote:
| I only use LLMs when I feel like being lied to.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Why should yankees.com be the first link? The visitor is
| interested in the baseball team, not necessarily their website.
| Google shows me a dashboard about the team with games, players,
| standings, recent results, upcoming games, etc. You can argue
| that Google hijack the traffic that websites would get
| otherwise, but I may get more relevant information as end user.
| pcrh wrote:
| Interesting perspective.
|
| I was in SF at the time, and remember Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta
| Vista, Yahoo, etc.
|
| Google's attraction at the time was not necessarily that it found
| you the best site for the information you sought, but that it was
| simple, uncluttered, and more varied. Yahoo, for example, lead
| you through a tedious "tree" of options, whereas Google allowed
| you to choose for yourself.
|
| After all, how were you to know that the links provided by Google
| were any better than those provided by others?
|
| In other interpretations of Google's success is the
| auction/bidding model for the advertising it did show. This was
| apparently so successful that it forced Google to become public,
| i.e. that the revenue it generated prevented Google from
| continuing to be a privately-held company. Others here might have
| a better insight into this aspect of Google's success.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Privately-held companies are allowed to have revenue.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I still remember a conversation I had in the day:
|
| me: "Here, I'll look for that using google, it's just about the
| best search engine around right now."
|
| colleague: "If it's really that good, why haven't I heard of it?"
|
| me: "You just did"
| raddan wrote:
| JFGI was a thing people actually said where I worked at the
| time. I wouldn't be caught dead saying that now.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Remember when a scrappy young Google used to mercilessly mock
| competing search engines for mixing their search results with
| paid ads in the same list?
| eschulz wrote:
| What are some noteworthy books on Google and its competition in
| the late 1990s?
| janesvilleseo wrote:
| If you haven't done a search in awhile on Bing it's also very
| horrible. In many search's there are only 1 or 2 organic results
| in the traditional sense.
|
| Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the
| search results, not just the top or bottom.
|
| The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs
| like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.
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